“We need a nationalist party in the United States of America,” said Savage on Aaron Klein’s WABC radio show.

“You have the rudiments of a new party in this country called a Tea Party. They need to restructure their party. They need a charismatic leader, which they don’t have,” he said. “When you say Tea Party no one knows who the leader is because there is no leader. No man has stepped forward who can lead that party.”

Savage is the third-most widely heard radio talker in the country, and a leading voice among conservatives seeking an alternative to the Beltway Republican Party.

“The Tea Party is the rudiment of the new nationalist party,” he said. “Somebody has to bring them all together, unite them like King David did the ancient tribes of Israel. And there is no King David out there. Who’s the King David? Tell me who is going to do it?”

Sounds fabulous. If it helps make this happen, I’m prepared to take the lead in repudiating every LGM post pointing out that 3rd parties in the American political context are suicidal. Also, RAND 2016!

That’s crazy. If you’d ever listened to his show, you know he’s completely aware that it is all a grift and he needs to be as racist and cracked as possible to keep the grift going. Beck’s the true believer/grift on the side; Savage believes none of it

Fun fact – David seized the kingship by allying with the Philistines against the actual king, Saul.
Who’s the King David?

I’m thinking more along the lines of a Duke than a King…

IM

Or a dux? perhaps a comes will do…

DrDick

Il Ducci, I believe.

rea

Although Daffey Ducci would be more their speed . . .

Bill Murray

pass the Ducci on the right hand side

DrDick

FTW!

herr doktor bimler

Somebody has to bring them all together, unite them like King David did the ancient tribes of Israel

Hang about, the ancient tribes were united until David staged a revolt against the duly-appointed leader Then he waged civil war for several years, and eventually arranged for the assassination of the appointed leader.

What about Likud? Or the fact that the Nationalist Party in South Africa cultivated very close relations with Israel. In fact a very large number of right wing regimes in Latin America including Somoza in Nicaragua also had very close relations with Israel.

Noriega’s Panama was swarming with Israeli advisers. It proved a bit embarrassing to US forces having to evacuate them while they trapped Ol’ Pineapple Face.

Jameson Quinn

In the 80s video on Youtube where the current president of Guatemala brags about where he killed the most people; and his underling brags about how he (the pres, then major) oversaw the torture of the (by then) corpses which, on the video, are literally under their boots; he also highly praises Israeli mortars for their effectiveness against “personnel”.

Lurker

The mortars are really terrible anti-personnel weapons, so the praise is surely warranted. Especially in a country like Guatemala, where roads are poor and the country is covered by vegetation, mortars are ideal artillery weapons: they are light, transportable and the high trajectory allows firing from very small clearings.

Especially the Iaraeli mortars, which utilize the Finnish WWII-era design, are very well suited to this purpose. A light 81 mm mortar can be carried by three men. A squad of six men can transport a mortar and the grenades needed for a couple of short fire bursts. A light infantry company equipped with an integral light mortar platoon is a very versatile and powerful anti-guerilla (or guerilla) unit, and can move in any terrain whatsoever without vehicles or roads. (Of course, to achieve foot mobility, the infantry cannot wear very much personal protection, so the losses are also likely to be high.)

“When you say Tea Party no one knows who the leader is because there is no leader. No man has stepped forward who can lead that party.”

I guess Michele Bachmann need not apply? Isn’t she the chair of the Tea Party Caucus?

Davis X. Machina

Savage is the third-most widely heard radio talker in the country,…

Sort of like ‘the third most commonly-diagnosed fungal infection in the country’.

Yeah, it’s better than not making the list at all, but is it really brag-about-at-class-reunions-worthy?

UberMitch

Savage is the ringworm of radio talkers.

BigHank53

What would you talk about at class reunions if you were Michael Savage?

On second thought, don’t answer that.

efgoldman

One of the side benefits of Boston’s FM talker switching to music: his show got shitcanned. I’ll probably show up on some low power daytimer that can’t be heard more than five miles away.

Davis X. Machina

Surely we still have Howie Carr and Jay Sevarin to fill those empty places in our souls?

efgoldman

Oh yeah, the Rupert blowhards. They’re on AM. The same people listen to AM radio that watch Fox.
I’m seriously surprised that no-one has confronted Howie and beat the shit out of him, all these years.

JL

And we can read Howie in the Boston Herald too!

I really cannot stand that man. I mean, I can’t stand any of those right-wing talk radio guys, or most of the Boston Herald opinion writers. But my dislike of Howie Carr is personal – he’s trashed friends of mine multiple times.

No, workers are moochers and looters, stealing money (though they’d probably employ the positively Orwellian euphemism “earning wages”) that rightfully belongs to their employers. It’ll have to be the National Anti-Socialist American Bosses’ Party.

MAJeff

National Anti-Socialist (totally Heterosexual) Job Creators’ Party.

UberMitch

Curse those four minutes since I last loaded the page!

UberMitch

Lemme fix that for you: National Anti-Socialist Job Creator’s Party

Sharculese

[‘I assume though that their shirts will be gray.’]

Their shirts will be made from nothing but the finest Reprocessed American Flag Product.

Green Caboose

There are two ways Michael “Savage” Weiner’s “Natzi” party could get a charasmatic leader. One is the GWB puppet method – get someone who doesn’t actually believe anything except a desire in money, have his statements tightly controlled by his puppet master, then start by convincing the Palin wing of the GOP that this leader is “one of them” so that they let slide any statement that doesn’t toe the party line because they figure he doesn’t mean it, he’s just appealing to the liberal media.

The second way is to get a Palin type who speaks in tongues and thus says something for every one of the teavangelicals.

Of the two the second would do better to unite the teahadists but the first has a chance of actually winning as the media will certainly play along, as they did with GWB.

calling all toasters

I could have sworn this was tried a year ago, and it ended up with Mitt “Charisma is for towels” Romney.

I guess it’s time to put that pony on hold, and start wishing for a white horse.

Keaaukane

Why not a unicorn?

jon

The only thin that could be better than a charismatic Nationalist party, would be if that party was also Socialist. Because they like parties and get togethers, you know, good times with torchlight parades and stuff.

But they should also consider their look so people know they’re serious. Like maybe some high collared uniforms in black, with some silver skulls and lightning bolts.

And a snappy, upbeat slogan to tie everything together, like ‘Strength Through Joy’!

Do you think calls like Savage’s might get the attention of our national MSM? As I read and watch their pathetic ways of covering the craziness all around us these days, I keep thinking of the many conversations I had years ago with two German Jewish old women I knew in Ann Arbor in the early 70’s, one an academic (with whom I studied), the other a physician (she’d tended German WWI soldiers, was the grandmother of a friend of mine). What both of them remembered in the lead-up to the Holocaust (which each of them escaped, but many in their families and among their friends did not): the unbelieving indifference of people who should have known better (“good Germans”) to the craziness developing around them, and then their acquiescence to it. Both women were incredibly sympathetic, thoughtful people, not given to recrimination (I consider myself blessed to have been in their presence). They would tell me their many stories with a look in their eyes: don’t let it ever happen again. But now I feel almost helpless. How to stop this madness?

BobS

I’m not particularly knowledgeable about Germany in the 1930s, but it’s my understanding that the Nazis moved quickly to establish a police state in Germany in 1933 after the Enabling Act and Reichstag Fire Decree- political dissent was punished not only by imprisonment (or worse) of the malcontents but also sometimes their families, making it less likely that actual “good” Germans would risk sticking their necks out. I’ve tended to have a big mouth when I perceived an injustice was being done to myself or sometimes others, but never with those consequences- I can’t honestly say I’d be too heroic if a bunch of sociopathic gangsters endowed with police powers promised to disappear my wife or children for my speaking out.

mch

Would that it were that simple.

BobS

I think it probably was just that simple much of the time- scared people who wanted to protect themselves and their families from an illegitimate government that assumed total power almost overnight and that ruthlessly suppressed dissent.
Sadly, I can’t imagine anywhere that people wouldn’t stand idly by with a similar “unbelieving indifference” given similarly brutal methods of coercion.

mch

Since we (you and I) are among the few here not engaged in smug snark. I understand and agree with much in the “scared people” scenario you evoke. (As would the two women I mentioned. They are heroines for me, not least for that reason.) Things weren’t quite so “overnight” though, as you suggest. There was time for many people — especially professors, doctors, people of that class — to consider, to think. And some did, though many did not.

The academic I refer to: she endured shunning, the silent-treatment from her colleagues. The doctor (who had treated, as physician and German patriot, WWI wounded soldiers) happened to practice in the 30’s near the Bundestag and took breaks to go listen there — that’s how she happened to see the writing on the wall.

I assume visitors to this site to be, if not professors and doctors, certainly people with the means and opportunity to consider, now. That’s all I am saying.

Lurker

The main problem of the Weimar Republic was the fact that its civil service was fundamentally disloyal to the government it served. Most were longing for the good old days of Kaiser. To be honest, the malcontent was mutual. The democratic, especially social democratic, governments had not been cultivating good relations with the bureacracy, which had had to suffer very large decrease in its real income and social standing. As a result, the administration was always dragging its feet, sometimes even activaly sabotaging the government policies. A good example is the foreign service: even 10 years after the founding of the republic, some embassies were still flying the imperial-era German flag and officially celebrating the imperial-era national day, instead of using the republican symbols. (The German national teams in most sports are still using the imperial red-white-black colour scheme, instead of the republican red-black-yellow. A testament to certain political spirit permeating the German sports.)

The Nazi government seemed to be, to most right-wing Germans, a precursor to the re-establishment of monarchy. Thus, the civil service and most of the “establishment” were quite willing to establish the Nazi police state. The same applied to Reichswehr, which supported the Nazi government. Thus, there was no “social space” for middle-class resistance in the critical early years.

Rhino

How could anyone interpret the rise of hitler as a return of monarchy? The guy was as far from an aristocrat as anyone could be.

The rest of your comment is pretty fascinating. Got any reading suggestions on the stuff you posted?

William Shirer’s “The rise and fall of the third reich” is a pretty good Western view on the topic, although it is old. It gives a pretty good idea about the opinions of the German establishment at the end of Weimar Republic. Shirer pays quite a lot of attention to the fact that many German conservatives believed that Hitler would reinstate monarchy after the death of Hindenburg. (Some early Nazi celebrations and symbolism also played towards this idea.)

If you want to read insider views on the rise of the Nazis, I’d suggest the memoirs of Wipert von Blücher (the Nazi ambassador to Finland, published in 1950) and the “History of the Second World War” of Kurt von Tippelskirch (published 1951). The authors are old-school conservatives who, naturally, are trying to white-wash themselves. However, the lack of self-awareness is astonishing, and the vews on the German internal politics are interesting.

The Social Democrats who declared the Republic and provided Weimar with much of its stability were, in theory, no great fans either. They were looking forward to the establishment of socialism. The fairly substantial number of Communists were even more aggressive about their disdain for the Republic. Too many people thought that democracy was not the solution but rather that democracy was the problem.

The Weimar Republic by Detlev Peukert is a good place to start. William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a reporter’s riveting eyewitness account.

Lurker

For Doug:

I am a European social democrat, although not a card-carrying party member. And I can vouch for you that the “socialism” of the social democrats was compatible with the Weimar constitution. The socialism supported by Ebert et al was the German “revisionist” socialism, which is founded on the principles of Leonard Bernstein.

In Bernsteinian thought, it was accepted as an empirical macro-economical fact that in the early 20th century, capitalism showed no signs of internal rot and the middle classes were not vanishing, as Marx had predicted. Even the labour class was not getting poorer. Thus, the there was no prospect of revolution. While socialism was the object, it would only be the final result of long parlamentarian and labour union struggle. Socialisation of banks and insurance companies was, on theoretical level, on the table until late 1980s, but has never occurred in any country where social democrats have been in the government.

In early 1980’s, the social democratic Finnish Prime Minister Kalevi Sorsa was asked what the socialism in Finland would look like. He answered: “It would look like the society we have today. It will not get any more socialist than we are now.”

Thlayli

The German national teams in most sports are still using the imperial red-white-black colour scheme, instead of the republican red-black-yellow. A testament to certain political spirit permeating the German sports.

I think that’s more down to inertia than a conscious statement. Like how Italy’s national teams continue to wear the royal family’s blue after 70 years without a royal family.

BobS

I think that many people did probably do a lot of thinking and considering in the years between the end of WWI & 1933 as well as after. But as Lurker, who clearly knows a lot more than I about the subject writes, the social conditions did not allow for resistance prior, and the Nazis did not allow for resistance after they assumed complete control of the government, which did occur with Blitzkrieg type speed and efficiency in 1933.
Also, while it’s easy for us to see now, there was no reason for anyone to recognize just how malevolent the Nazis were in the early years or how vicious they would become- there wasn’t a precedent for for people to liken them to, whereas now every tinpot dictator the United States wants to overthrow becomes the latest incarnation of Hitler. I think that most Germans (because the Nazis never really had the support of much more than a third of the voters) were like frogs getting boiled slowly.

Linnaeus

This reminds me of a comment by (I think) Robert Paxton (author of The Anatomy of Fascism, though I don’t think this comment was in the book) in which he points out that people often make the mistake of thinking that fascism is obviously happening somewhere by comparisons with fascism in its mature forms, without realizing that fascism is contingent on the particular times and places where it arises.

herr doktor bimler

When you say Tea Party no one knows who the leader is because there is no leader

I look forward to the contest between Mad Hatter, dormouse and March Hare.

Karate Bearfighter

The 2012 Republican primaries make a lot more sense if you imagine Newt ringing a little bell and shouting “change places!” after each state.

Rhino

Win.

cpinva

the queen of hearts is going to win that, as she offs their heads!

I look forward to the contest between Mad Hatter, dormouse and March Hare.

personally, i’m looking forward to those huge, torch-lit night rallies, they look kind of fun. will they be serving refreshments?

herr doktor bimler

The world does not need an “Alice in Nuremberg” mash-up.

Pestilence

Barbeque

Timb

If it helps make this happen, I’m prepared to take the lead in repudiating every LGM post pointing out that 3rd parties in the American political context are suicidal.p

Are you kidding? The sort of people who listen to Michael Savage wouldn’t listen to you or me if we told them water is wet. Those crazed white dudes are already at war with 80% of America

herr doktor bimler

Ahem. 100 – 27 = 73%.

Bill Murray

and then they hate a quarter of their own side

cpinva

“Night of the Long Knives II”

and then they hate a quarter of their own side

Bill Murray

Electric Bugaloo!!!!

Timb

Yeah, I think Savage speaks the Goldstein-Ian wing of the crazies, which I think is less than the 27%

I’ve got to say, it’s more than a little eerie that Michael Weiner is calling for a nationalist party with a charismatic leader.

bobbyp

You sneer now. Just wait ’till Galtstallnacht.

Keaaukane

Who will be the Enemy of this new Nationalist party? Who can we rally against, and blame every misfortune on? The Browns is sorta vague, plus we need cheap labor. Communism is dead. Picking on Jews tends to invite unfavorable comparisons, plus the evangelicals love Israel, even while waiting for it’s destruction. Terrorists, maybe?

This is against my better judgment, since I’m fully aware that my opinions about Israel are in the minority at this site, but the people using Mr. Savage’s comments to make quick swipes against Israel have absolutely no idea what they are talking about and are not very funny. They are actually being extraordinary offensive and it would be very much appreciated if they would refrain from doing so.

Jameson Quinn

I don’t see any swipes at Israel, just at its current government and 80s-era foreign policy. Which are pretty legit targets in my book, even for those who’ve never been there. I and probably most of the other swipers hope that 100 years from now, both Israel and the US exist, and that both have non-warmonger leadership.

Dude, I live here, and with one exception, I think most of these comments are spot-on. The exception – the implication that our army is made up of religious zealots. In fact, most of the ultra-religious don’t serve. Although that may change soon; there’s a movement to remove or at least substantially restrict the automatic religious exemption.

Israel providing the arms to death squads in Guatemala was offensive. Israel arming the Somoza dictatorship was offensive. Israel supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa was offensive. Criticizing Israel’s role in the mass murder and oppression in Central America and Southern Africa is not offensive.

I understand your worries, but I have been watching creeping fascism in the IS for a long time, despite living in the bubble that is the Bay Area. Michael Savage isn’t taken terribly seriously even by his listeners, and even the Klanliest of mid-country wingnuts dimly realizes that the money for his roads and bridges comes from them commie faggots on the coasts, so he’s just going to mouth off and abuse those closest to him, not organize for serious trouble. I was more worried back in the early ’90s, with a seriously organized militia/Jesus freak movement; not that I”m relaxed yet, but I don’t think we’re that much closer to a putsch than we have been many times before.

BigHank53

There are fascist elements in the body politic, and there always have been. Things were certainly worse both in 2003 and the start of the cold war. Have you read any Dave Neiwert? He’s got a valuable perspective–not always reassuring, but it will give you a grasp of the problem.

Right now there simply isn’t fertile enough ground for the seeds of fascism to sprout here. One of the most…interesting…things I’ve ever held in my hand was a letter with seventeen million Reichmarks’ worth of postage stuck to it. Now, the hyperinflation was from well before the rise of the National Socialists, but I doubt anyone had forgotten it, either.

The people to worry about now are the folks who want to strangle Social Security and/or forfeit the national debt. Whether they want to eliminate democracy or are just useful idiots hardly matters; if they don’t succeed fascism remains one of Mr. Savage’s fever dreams.

Also, do not underestimate the power of mockery.

herr doktor bimler

Consider the case of British fascism in the 1930s. Yes, eventually there was some legislative pushback when established politicians came to see them more as a liability than as a potential asset… but the main contributor to their political oblivion was smug snark. See Davis X. Machina’s reference to Spode upstream.

njorl

“They need a charismatic leader, which they don’t have,”

When they find that leader, they can hand him a bible to carry, and wrap him in a flag.

simple mind

All the more troubling (and sick) is that Savage is Jewish. As if Germany’s national party were not enuf.